Rishi Jain
In the past weeks, my group and I have been working on constructing our poster for the AGU conference.
August 10, 2020
In the past weeks, my group and I have been working on constructing our poster for the AGU conference. A bulk of the time that we spent was dedicated to data analysis and constructing our graphs. It was our first time using R, so we had plenty of errors, but we were able to work through them. In order to interpret our results, we conducted a logistic regression test and a correlation test between the regression coefficients and atmospheric oxygen in order to determine the relationship between body size and extinction risk and the relationship between oxygen levels and extinction risk based on body size. While most of our p-values were insignificant, we had a couple of strong correlation values. Furthermore, it was extremely interesting to see how the results varied for the three different brachiopod classes that we examined. We learned a lot more about the living habits and shells of Rhynchonellata, Strophomenata, and Lingulata. I also enjoyed listening to the other interns' presentations.
I am extremely excited to present at AGU later this year. I had a great time participating in this internship and I have learned a lot. I am extremely grateful for this opportunity.
In such a short amount of time, I feel that I have learned so much.
July 10, 2020
It has been a couple of weeks since this internship has begun. In such a short amount of time, I feel that I have learned so much. Pedro has taught me a lot about the impact of body size and oxygen levels and I hope to learn more. Furthermore, I have also learned the coding language R. Prior to the internship, I had no experience with R. However, now, I can create cool plots and work with data frames.
We were just assigned our groups and projects. My project is trying to uncover the relationship between body size and extinction levels and the relationship between oxygen levels and extinction levels for Brachiopods in the Ordovician time period. Here is my first hypothesis: If extinction levels are inversely related to body size of brachiopods, then as the body size increases, extinction levels will decrease. Here is my second hypothesis: If extinction levels are inversely related to oxygen levels, then as the oxygen levels increase, extinction levels will decrease. I am specifically testing for the class Rhynchonellata of the phylum Brachiopoda. My group mates will be exploring the classes Strophomenata and Lingulata. At first, we suspect that the trend for all three classes will be extremely similar, but we need to explore the data more carefully and construct our plots in order to test our hypotheses.
In addition to the internship with Pedro, I am also a part of the SEYI education program. This program is extremely interesting because each different meeting there are various professors and grad students who talk about their research and life journey. I have learned so much about so many different fields of science and this program has definitely increased my enthusiasm towards research and science. I am looking forward to the rest of the summer!